Berry met it from the ground.
He had dropped onto all fours, the pale length of him slung low between the four tentacles he used for legs, a dog braced in a doorway, and everything else that grew from his back went up at once. Twelve limbs. Fifteen. A red thicket opening toward the dome like a hand, wet and fast and thick as trees, every one of them aimed at the thing falling out of the dark with a sword over its head.
The figure did not try to cut through them. It landed on one.
Its boots met the first tentacle a body's length above the rock and stayed there. The red under the soles went white. Frost ran ahead of the stride in a furred crawl of rime, and the figure ran up the limb as though somebody had built it for the purpose, each step freezing what was inside before the foot lifted. Dark red went black. Black went brittle. The tentacle rang under the next footfall like a struck pipe.
Berry felt it coming. Felt his own blood stop, a pace at a time, climbing toward his spine. He tore the limb off at the root. It came away with a wet crack and a shriek through his teeth, and the frozen length hit the rock and burst like dropped glass while a new one was already pushing out of the wound.
The figure had not waited for it. It was on the next limb, and the next, never on one longer than a stride, and the thicket died under its feet in long glittering lines. Where the red came at it head-on the sword was already moving. Tentacles parted in sprays of dark that froze before they fell, and the figure went through the spray and out the far side. At the crown of the thicket it turned and came down the other face in long dropping strides, ducking one limb, rolling over another, and at the bottom it did not slow. It crossed the open shelf straight at the thin man at a dead run, and ten feet out it jumped.
It rose over Berry with the sword lifted in both hands, the whole slab of the blade screaming, and at the top of the jump it hung for the length of a held breath. Then it began to fall. One stroke, crown to groin.
Something gold hit the blade.
Sol had no time to be clever. He had come in low across the shelf with everything he had burning in his fists, and he got himself under the sword, between the armor and the man beneath it, and brought his hands together on the flat of the blade.
Palms to the broad faces. The chewing edges ran past his knuckles on either side, close enough that the glass-sound of them went through his teeth, and he did not touch them. He held, and for a moment the sword stopped, its tip a hand's breadth above the thin man's skull. Sol's boots dragged two lines through the rock. Steam came off his palms where gold met ice. Over the crossed blade the helm tilted down at him, and there was nothing in it at all.
Berry did not waste the moment.
Two tentacles whipped in from below. The first took Sol across the ribs and put him off the shelf like a thrown sack. The second hit the figure in the hip and flipped it end over end above Berry's head, and it went away tumbling toward the ice wall with the sword spinning after it. A third limb was already around the casing, lifting it off the rock and clamping it against his flank.
The figure hit the shelf, rolled twice, and came up on its feet as if someone had set it there. The sword landed point-first in the rock beside it, and it took the hilt without looking. Frost went out around its boots in a ring.
Sol came up a few seconds behind it, one palm on the stone, gold flaring along both arms. Night had taken a little of the light out of him, not much, and he still lit the dust around him like a lamp. He pushed off the rock and went after the figure low and fast.
It was already moving. It went at Berry again with nothing in the stride that suggested it had been hit.
Berry tore a slab the size of a car out of the shelf with three tentacles and threw it. The sword came across in a single stroke and the slab went past on either side of the figure, two clean halves, and hit the dome behind it with a crack that ran up the ice.
He was already sending everything else. Eight limbs, ten, a red wave rolling down the shelf across the sheen of frost, and the dome opened over them.
The dragons came out of the sky in a line, black water that turned to ice on the way down, and each one landed across a limb and froze it to the rock. The wave stopped as though it had hit a wall. Berry's tentacles hammered at the ice that held them, and in the middle of the pinned red the figure walked forward, unhurried, sword low.
Sol came in again from the side.
He crossed the shelf in a flat, fast arc, fists alight, aimed at the one thing on the island he had decided he could not leave standing. The head turned. It did not look surprised. A dragon came down on him out of the dark, a quarter of its length slamming flat across his back, and drove him into the rock hard enough to crater it.
He was still for a heartbeat. Ice crawled out from under the dragon's belly across the stone.
Then gold split the dragon open from the inside.
It went to steam and shards and a roar of light, and Sol went up through the middle of it like something fired from a gun. He kept going. He climbed toward the dome until he was only a point of gold against the ice, and the figure did not watch him go. It was already walking at Berry.
Berry tore himself loose. Limbs came off at the ice and left their ends behind, and the stumps pushed out new red as he moved. He backed away, still low on his four legs, along the curve of the shelf and then off it, where the rock ended and the island began, and every limb that was still free went out in every direction and took what it could reach and threw it. Slabs. A twisted length of railing. A door-sized plate of paving. The casing stayed clamped against his flank. He had been carrying it toward the Containment Facility before the figure ever rose from the crater, and nothing in the way he moved suggested he would let it go now.
The figure came after him through the wreckage without breaking stride.
The island was coming up the slope to meet them.
It had been coming since the dome closed, in pieces. The NCC line moved out from the plaza behind its cracked hulls with rifles up, the Beast Machine lurched along at the back, its six legs working like pistons, and out in front, because it was what they did, came the heroes.
War Hammer reached them first. The hammer had come back to him out of the belly of a dragon in a spray of black water, and he threw before his boots stopped moving, riding the throw in on a bar of magnetic fire with his braided beard streaming.
The figure did not dodge. It stepped into it. The hammer's head passed the flat of the blade and the gauntlet closed on the haft behind it, and the hammer stopped dead in the air.
War Hammer's feet left the ground. The pull that ran from his hand to the hammer's core had nowhere to go but through the man holding the other end, and it dragged him across the gap at the speed he had tuned the weapon to. He had time to open his mouth.
The sword met him halfway.
The hammer fell and rang once on the rock. The fire along it went out. What had been War Hammer slid down the blade and off it, and the figure had already moved on.
Saboteur said nothing at all. He was smiling, which was worse. The ground ahead of the figure was seeded with nothing anyone could see, and Saboteur walked a half step behind his own mines with both magenta gauntlets raised and his fingers spread, conducting them. Each time the figure's boot came down he flicked a wrist, and force went off under it in a flat, invisible punch. For the first time since the dome closed the figure staggered, a boot skidding, a shoulder dropping. Then the frost went out from it in a ring and ate the next dozen mines before they could fire, and Saboteur, who had not stopped smiling, bowed from the waist like a man at the end of a recital.
The sword left the figure's hand.
It crossed forty feet of open ground before the bow was finished, and the bow was the last thing he did. The blade tore back across the gap a moment later and the figure caught it without looking.
On the pile, the people in white had watched all of it.
They had watched the red thing that carried them out of the dark go backward across the island on its knees, and the other thing walking after it, and the heroes dying in the gaps between. Lemon's order was gone with Lemon. A woman who had not spoken since the tower fell looked at the figure, and at the cannon on legs lurching up behind it, and at the black masks on the slope who had told them to fight or go back to the cells, and she said the shortest thing she had left.
"Fuck this."
She ran. Nobody stopped her. A boy beside her ran, then three more, and then the whole huddled mass went off the rubble in every direction at once. Down the slope toward the harbor. Sideways into the dark scrub in the north. Back up into the ruin as if the ruin might hide them, iron collars bouncing on their collarbones, bare feet on broken glass.
Some of the black masks on the slope turned their rifles on the backs of the runners. A few of the NCC hulls fired at anything in a collar that crossed their sights, because it was dark and a man in a collar had been a terrorist ten minutes ago. Two of the runners went down. One got up.
Berry did not stop to see any of it. He kept backing, limbs flinging, and the wreckage he threw went into the oncoming line like a fist. An NCC hull rocked on its suspension. Behind it a woman in NKPD blue went down with a length of rebar through her thigh, and the line wavered and held, because the other thing was coming up the slope at a steady walk and had made perfectly clear what it was. The rifles opened on it. Every round that reached the figure split on the blade or turned aside on the halo of shards that hung around its shoulders, and the walk did not change.
High under the curve of the dome, a point of gold stopped climbing, turned over, and began to fall.
From the top of the arc Sol could see all of it at once. The runners and the rifles aimed at them. The ones who had already gone down in the open. The thing in ice walking through the middle with a sword, killing heroes as it went. The red mass, a terrorist, backing away with what he could only imagine was a bomb under his arm. The rifles pointed at people in collars, and half of them belonged to his own side. 'Nothing here sorts into two piles,' he thought. There was no time to make it sort.
He came down in a long arc, a falling curve that traded all of his height for speed, and took the figure at the bottom of it with both fists.
The island took the hit.
The shockwave left the point of impact in a flat white ring that stripped the ground to bare rock for a hundred feet, flipped the nearest hulls, and put every standing thing on the plateau onto its back. Dust went up in a wall. The dragons overhead shivered along their lengths. At the far end of the plateau, the slope of the rubble pile let go a slow slide of stone.
In the crater, Sol knelt on the figure's chest with both hands locked around its wrists and the sword pinned flat in the stone beside them. For the first time that day, something on the island was holding the thing down. The gold was a little thinner on him than it had been at dusk, and it was still bright enough to throw his shadow up the sides of the hole. A skin of rime crept up his forearms from the places where he gripped, and he ignored it.
"Stop," Sol said, through his teeth. "That's enough. They're beaten, they can't hurt anyone, you've made your..." He had no word for what it had made. "Whatever you want. Stop."
The helm looked up at him. It did not answer. Behind the chest plate under his knees something violet pulsed once, slow.
A rifle cracked on the slope.
Sol's head turned. He didn't mean it to. A woman in a collar had gone down in the open thirty yards away, and a masked rifleman was already working the bolt for a second shot, and every instinct he had built over years in the Reclaimed Zone was pulling him toward her at once. His grip eased. It eased by almost nothing.
Berry saw it.
He saw the two things he had learned to fear in a single night locked together in a hole, one holding the other down, and he did the arithmetic with the contentment of a man to whom nothing had gone right since he came up. Six limbs rose behind him. He stopped retreating. He came across the broken ground on his four legs at a dead run with the rest of himself lifted over his head like the roof of a house, and he brought it down on the crater from every side at once.
Lucius had been running for a long time.
He had run through the dragons and through the debris, and the shockwave had picked him up and set him down a body's length from where he started. There was blood dried on his lip again. His head rang. He had been muttering to himself since the shelf, a low running commentary nobody was close enough to hear. 'That's a lot of tentacles. That is a very large number of tentacles.' The Lord was in his hand because it had not occurred to him to put it anywhere else, and as the red came down on the crater he did a sum of his own.
'One.'
One round left. And Sol was in the middle of that hole. Whatever else happened on this island tonight, Sol did not die in it.
He lifted the revolver in both hands and fired.
The compensator threw its white cross across the dark. The round took the nearest limb where it crossed the one behind it, and both stopped being structures, two clean-edged gaps smoking at the rims, bloodless for a heartbeat. Then the blood came, and the rest of the pincer faltered in the air, its weight suddenly wrong on one side, and came down in the dirt a body's length from the crater instead of on it.
Berry's head turned. So did Sol's.
'King,' Sol thought, and then, because there was a great deal of noise and nobody to hear him, "King! Get back!"
"Busy," Lucius called.
The figure used the half second the way it used everything. Its wrists turned under Sol's hands. The rime on his forearms went to the elbow all at once, and it came up out of the stone and threw him off like a coat. Sol went across the plateau trailing steam and hit the ground rolling and came up already moving, and the figure rose, and it did not look at Lucius, or at the smoking gaps in Berry's limbs. It looked at Berry, and went.
Lucius had the revolver broken open, the barrel hinged down and the spent casing falling, and a fresh round between his fingers when the Beast Machine opened up.
The pilot had been waiting for a clear shot since the shockwave. What he saw through the canopy was an ice thing, a gold thing, a red thing, and a man in a dark coat standing alone in the open with a gun, and he did not have the time to sort them by size. The twin autocannons found Lucius first. The line of impacts walked across the broken ground toward him in a chain of small explosions, and Lucius threw himself out of it and rolled over a slab and came up running with two rounds in the barrel and the third somewhere in the dirt behind him.
"Hey!" He was shouting at a machine that could not hear him. "Aim that somewhere else! I might be bulletproof but I'm not that bulletproof!"
He snapped the barrel shut. He had said that out loud, to a machine, he noticed. It seemed like something he would be embarrassed about later.
The line of fire left him. The turret swung across the plateau and settled, and the pilot found the thing he had been told to find. A pale man backing away on four limbs with a cylinder clamped against his side.
Priority target.
The first shell from the heavy cannon took the tentacle that held the casing.
It went through at the shoulder. The stump whipped and the cylinder left it end over end, ringing like a bell where it hit a slab and then again where it hit the next, and it bounced and rolled away down the long slope toward the plaza, out of the light, until it fetched up against the lip of a flipped NCC hull at the plaza's edge and lay half in its shadow.
Berry watched it go, and the bottom dropped out of his face. Years in the dark, and the statement he had been carrying toward the Containment Facility lay under a stranger's wreck in a gutter of broken glass. He turned his whole body toward it and went.
The figure hit him from behind.
It did not cut him. The flat of the blade took him across the back with the figure's whole weight behind it, and it drove him forward across the plateau on his own limbs, forty yards in a spray of frozen red, and put him through the NCC line like a battering ram.
Three hulls went over. Berry came up in the middle of the wreckage with his limbs full of soldiers.
He did not decide it. It was what the limbs did when they closed on warm things. The red went in under armor plate and at the throat and under the ribs, and what came back up the limbs was bright and quick. An NCC trooper went grey in the time it took her to scream. An NKPD sergeant tried to fire point-blank into his chest and dropped the weapon when the hand holding it went white. A man behind a hull crawled backward on his elbows, shouting for a medic who was not coming. The Mandrake planted his roots in the paving and screamed at the red, and for a heartbeat the scream shook it, and then a limb folded him over a wrecked hull and he lay where he fell, moving.
Airbrush got the ink off in time. Black and white lines shot from both wrist cannons and bound three of the red limbs to the rock and held, for the length of a breath, and Berry pulled. The lines went taut. Airbrush came across the broken ground in a long helpless skid and hit the flank of a hull hard enough to dent it. A cigarette fell out of Airbrush's mouth and was still burning when it reached the dirt. Airbrush slid down the plating, bent wrong in two places, and did not get up. One hand opened and closed on the ground.
It was working. Berry could feel it working. The blisters on his shoulders closed one after another. The grey went out of his lips. Color came up under his skin as if someone had turned up a lamp inside him. He was taller than he had been a minute before, the veins under his skin no longer blue but dark red and humming, and five new limbs were already pushing out of his back where he had lost five. He threw back his head and laughed, and it was the laugh of something finally fed.
The figure struck at the back of him again.
The sword came down across the roots of three new limbs and they parted and the frost went up them. Berry did not tear the limbs off this time. He did not have to. The blood in them was fresh and hot and somebody else's, and the frost came in slower. For the first time, the cold lost ground. The limbs shed and regrew faster than the rime could climb them, and Berry turned in the middle of his own gore and met the figure head-on with everything he had, and the two of them went back and forth across the churned ground in a storm of red and glittering white, neither giving.
Sol hit the edge of the fight at full speed and did not reach it.
He saw the masked rifleman first. The man was lifting his weapon at the back of a running woman in a collar, thirty yards from the line, and Sol was across the distance before he had decided to be, and the rifle was a bent tube in his fist and the man was on his back looking up at a sun that had come down to earth. A hull fired on a runner. He got his shoulder under its barrel and shoved it skyward. A boy was crouched in the open with his arms over his head, and he was in Sol's arms and across the plateau and set down behind a slab in the time it took the boy to open his eyes.
Every time he turned back to the fight, something else had happened behind him.
Behind the figure, the Beast Machine lumbered up the churned ground with its guns tracking Berry through the middle of the NCC line, and the guns did not fire. There was too much NCC blue between the cannons and the red. The pilot's finger would not make that choice. The turret swung left, then right, and the sensor ring did what it was built to do between targets, and looked.
Orange had come up out of the rocks with her arms bare.
The silver was gone, sprayed across thirty yards of shelf in beads that were already going dull. Her chest hurt where the water had hit it. She stood a while with one hand on her ribs and looked at what the island had become. The heroes were dying. The prisoners were running. The pit she had cut in the wall had closed behind her. The statement was meant to be made down the coast, at the Containment Facility, with the whole city watching, and the dome had put an end to that the way a lid puts an end to a jar.
She started walking inland, because there was nowhere left to walk to except the middle.
Nobody stopped her. Nobody was looking. Everyone on the island had something in front of them that was worse than a bored woman with bare arms, and she passed through the edges of three separate fights without anyone turning a head. At the foot of the pile she stopped.
Lemon lay where the figure had left him, at the foot of the ledge, in two pieces.
His hands were open. Orange looked at his face for a while, because nothing about it asked her to do anything else. Then she crouched.
The remote was clipped to the belt, on the half that still had one. A flat black thing the size of a deck of cards, a guarded switch under a hinged cover. She had watched him check it every hour since they came ashore. She reached for it and stopped, because her hands were bare and she knew exactly what her hands would have done to it. She took it by the edges with two fingers.
The casing was nowhere near. It had gone the other way, down the slope toward the plaza, and she had seen it go. Sixty yards of broken ground lay between her and it. She did not need to see it.
"You."
The voice came from a speaker in the Beast Machine's flank, enormous, flat with distortion, and it rolled across the plateau from forty yards off. The sensor ring had stopped turning. Every lens on it had settled on a woman at the foot of the pile, crouched over a body with something black between two fingers.
"You at the ledge. Put it down. Put the device on the ground and step away from the body."
Orange stood up.
She looked at the canopy. She looked across the plateau, at the thin man in the middle of the NCC line grown huge and bright, and the thing in ice he was fighting, and the gold light tearing back and forth at the edge of both with its arms full of strangers. She looked at the dome. None of them were going anywhere.
"If we can't get off this island," she said, not loudly, "then the whole island goes."
"Put it down. Last warning."
She flipped the cover with her thumb.
"Fine," Orange said. "Here, then."
The Beast Machine was already moving. Six legs hit the paving at once and it came across the broken ground in three strides that shook the pile, and Orange pressed the switch and let the last of her silver run down her forearms into two small bright plates and held them up in front of her face.
The pad came down. The sound was short. When the leg lifted there was silver on the rock, spread thin, and then it was not moving.
Sixty yards away, in the lee of a flipped NCC hull on the edge of the plaza, three bands of amber lit one after another down the casing's ribs, from the top to the bottom, and the whole thing began to pulse. A slow, even rhythm. Like something with a heart.
Nobody saw it.
Berry had the figure by the arms. Sol had a runner in each hand and a rifle under his boot. Somewhere out in the dark the Mandrake was dragging himself toward Airbrush by his elbows, and the NCC line had no breath left to look anywhere. The pulse of amber sat in the shadow of the wreck where no one had a reason to be looking.
Two things on the island saw it.
The pilot, whose HUD flagged the casing a half second before his leg came down. And a man in a dark coat on one knee in the dirt, with two rounds left in The Lord and blood on his lip, who had marked where the casing came to rest and had been looking back at it every few seconds ever since, the way a tongue goes back to a loose tooth.
Lucius was already on his feet.
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TO BE CONTINUED